Failing Fast?: The Ten Secrets to Succeed Faster

By Luv Tulsidas

While the world demands more meaningful innovation from business leaders, the current paradigm for delivering that innovation is not working anymore! The prevailing workplace culture has inadvertently slowed the pace of much-needed transformations.

What do you expect to happen when the popular culture in business embraces the principle of “fail fast, fail often”? More success? More breakthroughs?

Enterprises cannot afford to fail at producing useful innovations because unprecedented disruptions are now imminent as a result of the recent advancements in AI. This evolution coincides with a seismic socio-economic shift that is in progress across the world. Companies that want to be taken seriously must be able to generate bigger profits and deliver significantly more value for the communities they serve. The only way to achieve this is by succeeding faster and more cost effectively at innovation and automation. In other words, “Innovation done right!”

In Failing Fast?, you’ll discover the ten secrets to succeed faster, which have been career saving for established CEOs and enterprise leaders. Particularly, when they had no choice but to transform their companies by delivering disruptive innovations their businesses needed to stay relevant. These secrets also helped many entrepreneurs succeed with the limited funding and the short runway that startups get to execute their vision. In these volatile times, we need leaders and dreamers like you to be empowered with a new mindset and a highly effective method to build your dreams of the future without having to rely on luck.

In this book, you’ll learn how to:

• Succeed faster by aligning with the extremely powerful market forces, the zeitgeist!
  
• Work smarter before working harder to succeed faster in these disruptive times.
  
• Build a strong vision to lead you through the distractions on the way to your destination.
  
• Build an invincible team that will burn-on through the impossible times.
  
• Most importantly, find your winning wow factor and choose the right day-one customer before wasting your resources on building your vision of the future!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forbes Books
• Release date: Dec 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781955884914

Luv Tulsidas

Born with subpar physical traits and intelligence, the formative years of LUV TULSIDAS were filled with challenges. He hustled his way from a tiny paradise island in Africa to a decent engineering university in the US without a high school degree. Entering the corporate world at the dawn of the new millennium, he joined Hertz—the car rental giant, and led the development of their e-commerce platform from 0 to $5 Billion in annual revenue. Luv’s natural ability to dream big and do bold got him pretty far, and was the catalyst for him starting a company that went on to earn a reputation for innovation done right. In 2019, his brainchild Techolution won the prestigious Inc. 500 award for being one of the fastest-growing companies in America. Since then, he has been hyper-focused on working smart before working hard and has now built one of the most admired brands to help enterprises with their AI done right journey.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

While the world demands more meaningful innovation from business leaders, the current paradigm for delivering that innovation is not working anymore! The prevailing workplace culture has inadvertently slowed the pace of much-needed transformations.

What do you expect to happen when the popular culture in business embraces the principle of fail fast, fail often, and pivot often? More success? More breakthroughs?

As a wise person said a long time ago, Life will give you more of what you wish for. Therefore, I say to the wise people of today, Be more mindful of what you wish for!

Enterprises cannot afford to fail at producing useful innovations because unprecedented disruptions are now imminent as a result of the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This evolution coincides with a seismic socioeconomic shift that is in progress across the world. Companies that want to be taken seriously must have the following co-existing agendas in their vision: (1) Generate bigger profits and (2) Deliver significantly more value for the communities they serve. The only way to achieve this is by succeeding faster and more cost-effectively at innovation. In other words, Innovation Done Right!

The ten secrets to succeeding faster in this book have been a career saver for established CEOs and enterprise leaders. Particularly, when they had no choice but to transform their companies by delivering innovations their businesses needed to stay relevant. These secrets also helped many entrepreneurs succeed with the limited funding and the short runway that startups get to execute their vision. In these volatile times, we need leaders and dreamers like you to be empowered with a new mindset and a highly effective method to build your dreams of the future without having to rely on luck. Ironically, people like to rely on luck even though luck is unreliable by nature. Without further ado, let me introduce you to the most powerful concepts that you will learn in this book:

• Succeed faster by aligning with the extremely powerful market forces—the zeitgeist!

• Work smarter before working harder to succeed faster in these disruptive times.

• Build a strong vision to lead you through the distractions on the way to your destination.

• Build an invincible team that will burn on through the impossible times.

• Most important, find your winning wow factor, and choose the right day 1 customer before wasting your resources on building your vision of the future!

Who Is This Book For?

Whether you are a CEO looking to modernize your established enterprise or you are a board member trusted by shareholders to influence a more exciting future for your business.

Whether you are a visionary entrepreneur building a company to change the world or you are an intrapreneur developing a game-changing solution for the organization where you work.

Whether you are an ambitious student or you are a nobody who aspires to build their grand vision of the future.

Regardless of where you are in your life journey, you will find the secrets in this book highly valuable if you have the need to deliver meaningful innovation for your market fast enough to get ahead of the rest.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our dreams could manifest themselves by waving our magic wands? OK, I know that’s a little too much of a fairy-tale talk for a book of this genre. But for too long now, the business world has been following a fairy-tale approach to innovation: fail fast, fail often, and pivot often. Try again and again, fail over and over, until you achieve success.

The evidence that this popular methodology has not been effective is in the fact that 80 percent of transformation initiatives and innovation projects in enterprises fail to deliver their intended value. I have personally witnessed this as an employee of a major company and, more recently, as the leader of a consulting firm helping many legacy enterprises transform themselves to avoid the fate of these statistics.

Startups are supposed to be nimble and more efficient. Conventional wisdom says that startups must be doing much better because they don’t have all the legacy baggage and the infamous technical debt of older businesses. Is that true? Consider the shocking fact that 90 percent of startups go out of business before achieving their vision within the first five years.

This strategy is not meant for 99.9 percent of us because most people and businesses cannot afford to take major risks again after failing at their first moonshot. Nonetheless, this has somehow become the mainstream business approach to innovation.

So, who is responsible for all the waste and inefficiencies that exist in business today?

The catch me if you can business leader! It is undeniable that the people responsible to lead us, CEOs and executive leaders, are failing in high numbers.

Modern CEOs and business leaders have become very good at playing catch me if you can, as depicted in the famous movie by the same title. According to recent surveys, the median tenure of a CEO in a company is down to a record low of five years, and executive leaders have an even lower life span on the job.¹ The world is changing so drastically that no company vision can be taken seriously today without innovation being at its core.

Innovation is hard. Wait, that is wrong, so let me correct myself. Innovation is very very hard! It takes about five years to deliver on a good vision, and the data shows us that most company leaders are not able to deliver on their vision. So they are getting fired or conveniently leaving for the next job when their five-year vision comes due. They say catch me if you can to their outgoing company, while they move on to a new job to repeat the same cycle every three to five years.

What should we do? Keep on firing and replacing the executives every five years? Maybe we should fire them faster. Every two years would be better?

When a problem is this systemic, firing people is not going to get us anywhere. This is not a people problem. The root cause lies in the mindset and methods being used for innovation by companies today. They are clearly not working anymore!

The seasoned leaders are well aware of this risk, so they tend to avoid taking on major innovations for their business. While that appears to be a safer approach, especially for those closer to retirement, it is becoming less viable of an option for executive leaders. This is because the world is approaching the point of inflection with rapidly evolving geopolitical, macroeconomic, and technological shifts converging at once.

So, something significant has to change, and that change has to happen fast.

Why Should You Listen to Me?

I would love to tell you that I was born a prodigy, and one day I woke up with an epiphany of the ten secrets to conquer business innovation.

But the truth is that in the first four decades of my life, I worked very hard to acquire the knowledge and skills that I didn’t have but needed to keep up with my ambitions. The silver lining is that because I earned my path to success the hard way, I am now able to articulate for you, through this book, the important lessons I have learned on my journey from there to here.

I was born with subpar physical traits, intelligence, and personality. My formative years were filled with challenges, and I had no achievements to show for during this period. However, I was blessed with the natural ability to dream about big and unrealistic things that I had no idea how to accomplish. There is a long list of celebrity entrepreneurs who did not make it through college. I did better than them. I did not graduate high school! This may be a shock to many who know me as I am revealing this personal secret for the first time.

Wait, but there is a twist to this story. Somehow, I hustled my way from my birthplace on a tiny island in Africa to a reputable engineering university across the world in the United States, without a high school degree. How that happened is a story for another time.

In college, I barely managed to survive academically and took much longer than most in my cohort to graduate. Society had written me off because I didn’t look or sound like someone who had a chance to become successful. I could not articulate my superpower to anyone without being laughed off. Yet, deep in my heart, I knew that someday, somehow, I would build something very special that would bring a lot of value to the world, and in the process, I would become very successful.

I did not know exactly how I would get there for the first two decades of my life, but I was not willing to accept the fate that others had decided for me. So, I worked very hard after college to acquire the necessary skills and found a way to rapidly catch up with my larger-than-life ambitions. Often, I sacrificed personal relationships to overcome my gaps. Once, I worked forty-eight hours straight to accomplish a mission impossible at my first corporate job. This phase of my life taught me what actually works and what doesn’t.

The most valuable lessons I learned came across the spectrum of a fifteen-year career as an employee and a leader at a large enterprise, followed by the last seven years as a founder, entrepreneur, and CEO of my startup—Techolution.

I started my career in the corporate world as an entry-level employee. My superpower as a dreamer combined with a solid work ethic led me to become an intrapreneur. I built the digital platform for one of the oldest and most recognized brands in the world from zero to $5 billion per year in less than six years. Over the past seven years, I had an amazing journey as a founder of the company that I started with nothing but a dream and the gracious support of my wife.

Today, with the partnership of some amazing leaders and a great team, I have built Techolution to be an admirable brand that transforms traditional enterprises with Innovation done right. We are a consulting firm that helps our clients innovate their business at a guaranteed price by leveraging the power of novel technologies, such as real-world AI, to help them thrive in this new era.

In 2019, I won the prestigious Inc. 500 award on behalf of Techolution, for being one of the fastest-growing companies in America. In 2022, Techolution proudly received the Best-in-Business award for being the best in our industry. While building Techolution to become the brand that is admired for Innovation done right across the world, I had the privilege of working with a variety of businesses on their major transformation initiatives. As we were earning a reputation for delivering hyper-velocity success on impossible innovation projects for major clients, my business was growing rapidly. On the personal side, my family was also growing, and I was accumulating more gray hair by the day. When I could not possibly work harder anymore, I had no choice but to become obsessed with finding a smarter way to succeed faster and further.

After years of research and real-world testing, I have meticulously curated the top ten most effective secrets to help you avoid the common mistakes most people make on their journey to build their innovative ideas. It is time to stop failing fast and start succeeding faster and winning more often.

Ultimately, my motivation for taking on the monumental effort of writing a book about a complex topic like this while still leading a growing company full-time is very personal. I want to help as many people who have the desire to build successful businesses to make sure they do it faster, and in a way, that will lead to a better world for our kids. The world needs more people like us to win faster. So, let’s channel our dreams and magnify our superpowers to leave a legacy that will be appreciated for generations to come.

INTRODUCTION – KEY TAKEAWAYS

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YOUR NOTES

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PART I

THE SUCCEED-FASTER MINDSET

Learn the mindset required to help you succeed faster and win consistently.

Succeed Faster SECRET #1

Dream Big and Do Bold

are the two ingredients you need to get started on the journey to succeeding faster at your big goals.

CHAPTER 1

DREAM BIG AND DO BOLD

Our world is at a critical inflection point. Technology has unquestionably become an integral part of our lives. At the current pace of innovation, the way we experience life on this planet will drastically change by the end of this decade and beyond. The good news is how the current spurt of evolution ends up impacting our lives remains undecided. And the bad news is there isn’t much time left to roll up our sleeves and influence the final outcome.

While the universe has been continuously changing since the beginning of time, meaningful evolution happens in waves. Right now, we are in the early stages of a new zeitgeist. How these incoming new waves of innovation will impact our civilization is yet to be determined. What we know for sure is that there are two distinct possibilities.

The first option is pretty dire. In this scenario, we end up with a world that has humans addicted and enslaved by their own innovative creations, benefiting a few forces in the world who are abusing the rest of us for their greed and power. They are making strides toward deploying new technologies to make this grim version a reality.

The alternate possibility is a much more positive one, where we innovate with the primary purpose of enriching the human experience. The leaders who do the hard work and take the risks to make the change happen will be well rewarded. In this version, we won’t have to choose between doing good for society versus economic growth. We won’t need to worry about working stressful mundane jobs versus losing our livelihoods to automation. As a result of our own creations working for us, we will have an abundance of opportunities so that everyone can live to their fullest potential without discrimination.

It is still possible to build a world where innovation, corporate profits, and meaningful social causes come together to create an unstoppable force for good. In this book, we will explore such a win-win model that is urgently needed to prevent a major revolution currently developing because of the growing divide between the rich and the poor, the left and the right, the super successful and the 99 percent of the population.

So, are you going to sit on the sideline and just watch how it goes?

Or,

Are you going to be a force for good and make your impact on what happens next?

Whether you were born average or talented, whether you are privileged or underprivileged, it doesn’t really matter because,

Only those who dare to dream big and have the courage to do bold stand a chance to achieve great things in life.

But wait, is dreaming big going to be enough to succeed?

While our ability to dream big and our warrior-like courage to make bold moves are the fuel that is needed to get through the treacherous journey of dream building, it is not going to be enough.

Even the most ambitious of the visionaries and bravest of the brave end up dying a slow death by one thousand cuts on their journey to success.

I have always been a dreamer. Ever since I was young, I struggled to wake up in the morning because I couldn’t sleep at night. As a child, I grew up in a very normal, happy, and stable home. I had a role model father, a loving mother, a bright older sister, and an adorable younger brother. We were not wealthy, but we lived well, and all our basic needs were fulfilled.

Every night, when my father returned from work, we would all sit at the dinner table as a family, say a prayer, and eat the delicious dinner that my mother cooked. After dinner, we would finish homework and watch TV together as a family. By 10:00 p.m., everyone went to their bedrooms, and the lights were off.

When it was quiet outside and the whole world was falling asleep, my vivid imagination would come alive. While lying in bed and staring at the ceiling in pitch dark, my mind would go on these wild adventures. I could not help but get lost in the thoughts of something big that I would invent and build in the future.

My open-eyed dreams were often larger than life and way beyond my league at the time. At 2:00 a.m., my adrenaline would be pumping at full speed, and I would not be tired enough to fall asleep until after 4 a.m. Often, I would see the crack of dawn before my eyes would close for the night. As a result, I would get in trouble the next day. School started at 8:00 a.m. sharp, and every weekday morning, my father would wait in his car at 7:30 a.m. to drop all three of his kids to school. By 7:40 a.m., my father would leave the house with only two of his three kids. The first few days of every school season, he would give me the benefit of the doubt and wait a little longer. But it wasn’t fair to my sister and brother because waiting for me meant that they would all be late for their school.

As a result, I had to walk to school, which made me even more late and got me in even bigger trouble. My first-period teacher was very upset with me. The school had a very strict culture of discipline and punctuality. On top of that, my teacher was a man with a big ego. He felt that I was disrespecting him by coming late to his class in the morning. As a result, the teacher had to punish me in order to teach me a lesson about punctuality.

In today’s world, these punishments would be considered physical abuse and illegal. Back in the 1980s, on the paradise island of Mauritius in Africa, in a post-British-colony democracy, it was not uncommon for teachers and other grown-ups to physically punish bad kids.

I was a very young boy, six years old to be precise, when my teacher asked me to stand on a classroom desk in front of my classmates as a punishment for being late to class. To be fair, he had given me verbal warnings on the first two days of school when I showed up late. For a shy kid like me, having to stand on a desk in front of my classmates was torturous enough, but this was the culture of the old colonial British education system that was pervasive in Mauritius at the time. Since this would not qualify as a real punishment, my teacher had to step it up a notch.

As I stood on my little classroom desk, some of my classmates burst into laughter. The teacher went on to ask the rest of the class to laugh at me. Those who were not laughing already obeyed and laughed out loud. Then the teacher went on to pull my pants down. As tears dropped from my eyes, with my naked butt exposed to the classroom mocking me, I froze! I was not able to say what I was thinking, Sorry, I won’t be late again, please stop. The teacher hit me hard with a thick wooden stick on my little six-year-old rear.

As the beating started, the entire first-grade classroom got quiet and watched in shock. The teacher asked, Are you sorry? Will you ever be late again? My throat choked so tight from a combination of fear and embarrassment that words would not come out of my mouth. Since the teacher did not hear me say sorry out loud, the beating continued for a few more minutes until he realized that if he didn’t stop now, the visible damage might get to a level where he would bring a lot of negative attention from the authorities onto himself.

One would imagine that this kind of traumatic punishment would teach me a lesson about punctuality and I would never be late again. Quite the contrary happened. I was late to school again and again in spite of the brutal punishments that I dreaded. What nobody understood is that I was not intentionally going late to school to be rebellious. Becoming a rebel without a cause was the last thing on my mind. I had no intention to disrespect anyone. The problem was not in my control. I tried very hard to sleep on time at night, but I was not able to. I was not staying up late at night and waking up late in the morning on purpose. Since I was not a good communicator, nobody was interested in hearing my excuses about the adventurous open-eyed dreams that kept me up at night.

Eventually, my teacher gave up on trying to teach me punctuality. He asked me to wait outside of his classroom for the whole first period whenever I was late. That sounded like a more reasonable punishment for my inability to follow the rules. So, every morning, I stood outside of the classroom during the first period until the principal of the school took notice. The matter escalated into a bigger and more formal action that involved my parents!

Dreaming big was one of the only secrets to success that I did not have to learn the hard way in this life. I was born with it, and it stuck with me through good and bad times. I strongly believe that it’s the only reason why I was able to defy all odds. It also allowed me to learn the other nine secrets of success that got me through my journey from there to here.

Success Is Uniquely Individual

I didn’t write this book to motivate you to dream big. There are plenty of books and motivational speakers who have been doing that longer and better than I can. I assume that you already have a desire to accomplish something big and innovative. Why else would you read a book about succeeding faster at innovation?

My goal is to show you a battle-tested method to build your innovative idea effectively enough so that you can attain the escape velocity needed to get to your destination before running out of resources and ending